Lawless Walkthrough

Game Introduction – Lawless

Lawless is an arcade shooter created by Mobage. It’s an interesting mix of a sort of light gun arcade shooter and a collectible card (read: gun) game. Gamezebo’s quick start strategy guide will provide you with detailed images, tips, information, and hints on how to play your best game.

Quick Start Guide

Getting Started

There’s a good chance you’re already familiar with this first step, but if you’re not it’s a cinch: just scroll up to the top of the page and use the “Available On” option to start downloading Lawless and follow along.

Upon starting the game up, you’ll be asked to log in with your Mobage ID. If you have one, I’d suggest doing it so that your progress will be saved to your account rather than your device, allowing you to stop, delete, reinstall and start playing again at your leisure. If you don’t have an account, I’d suggest making one. The same basic idea goes for the Facebook login prompt. However, if you’d prefer to keep things anonymous you can also go the Guest route.

The tutorial section is something of a whirlwind, but the basic idea is this: repeatedly tap anyone on the screen highlighted in red until they die from it. Slightly more complex elements will come into play later, but for now just tap the red things and you’ll do fine.

Interface

Let’s take a moment to go over Lawless‘ interface, shall we? Right then. The main screen displays your crew (depending on your progress this might be just your main character or a group of several gun-toting ruffians). Stuff like their level, rank, stats, etc. If you have more than one character available (i.e. a leader and wingman), swipe left and right to switch between them.

The very top of the screen displays your player rank (different from your leader/wingman rank), number of available lives (limit of three and they recharge at a rate of one every 20 minutes), gun collection (displayed as a percentage), Gold (required for ranking up), and Cash (for buying and upgrading weapons).

Along the bottom you have the button to access your Mobage account, Help (feedback, view the EULA, and the FAQ), Ally list (manage allies, send gifts, etc.), Inbox, Free Gifts (i.e. rewards for getting friends to join), and “Go!” to jump into a mission.

Once you’re ready to start a mission you’ll have a vertically-scrolling list of jobs to do. Once a job is completed you can replay it as often as you’d like, but the amount of Gold you can acquire is limited to the number of stars you earn in each mission. Cash, on the other hand, you can just keep stockpiling.

Tap on a photo to select a mission, and then view the details on the right (target points, bonus requirements, etc.).

Tap the Boost button to activate a performance boost (if you have one) and double your point, XP, and Cash rewards for 30 minutes.

Tap “Go” to move to the Weapon Select screen.

On the Weapon Select screen you’ll see lists of all the guns you’ve acquired (left), as well as all the guns you can theoretically buy (right). The stats of the currently selected weapon are displayed in a large window on the far-left and include things like rarity, damage, level, category, and so on. If you want to level-up a gun, this is the place to do it.

Tap the Level Up button in the gun’s stat window to spend the indicated amount of Cash and increase its level by one. Once its level is maxed out, you can spend Gold to increase its Rank and level it up again while retaining its previously maxed stats. In other words, you can make the gun a lot more powerful than it was originally.

If you don’t like or want a gun, you can also sell it using the Sale Value button in the stat screen. Note that there’s no confirmation that pops up when you tap this button, so be careful not to accidentally sell off something you’ve poured a lot of money into.

Once a weapon is selected you can tap on a character portrait (the leader or wingman) to equip it to that character. Note that certain characters get damage bonuses for certain weapon types (indicated under Weapon Type in the stat window).

If you’d rather buy a weapon, you can tap on one in the right-hand For Sale list to check it out. You can also Test Fire the weapon to get a feel for the fire rate and clip size before you buy. Note that many of these weapons require Coins to purchase, and Coins can only be acquired by buying them with real money.

Once you’re ready, tap “Go!” to move on to the next and final prep screen: Ally Selection.

From the Ally Selection screen you can spend Coins to temporarily hire elite allies, bring along another player’s character (if you’ve become allies), grab a random player character to take along and possibly add to your ally list, or “Go Alone!” to jump in without any outside help (aside from your wingman, of course). Note that hiring another player character will deduct a small percentage of your mission earnings, with less taken out for Allies.

Either tap “Take” on a player’s character or tap “Go Alone!” to get to the action.

Combat

Displayed along the top of the screen from left to right: Leader Health, Combo Meter, Star Ranking, Points, Level Timer, Ammo counter, and Pause.

As I mentioned previously, the basic idea in Lawless is to shoot all the red stuff. Enemies (police or rival gangs) will run and/or pop on to the screen and attempt to put more bullets in you than you will in them. The trick is to not let that happen.

Your character will automatically take cover and only emerge to shoot when you tap the screen. You can use this to your advantage and avoid getting blasted to oblivion, but know that eventually enemies will start chucking grenades and no amount of cover can protect you from the blast. In those instances, your best bet is to try and shoot the grenade out of the air.

All enemies will be highlighted in red, while some special enemies will temporarily display a white aura that will shift to red after a second or two. These special enemies allow you to build up a combo meter that will drop if you let them escape (you don’t have to kill them before the white turns to red, but you don’t want to let them get away entirely).

Combos are the key to netting more stars, and by extension, more rewards.

Civilians are highlighted in green and you do not want to shoot them. Killing a civilian will end your combo streak, deduct money from your payout, and in some cases directly lead to failure if keeping the civilian casualties below a certain number turns out to be a mission requirement.

If you want to take a moment to reload during a slight lull in the action, tap the ammo icon on the top-right corner of the screen. Note that once the reloading animation starts and the meter appears and starts to fill, you can swipe the screen to speed it up.

Every now and then, depending on whether or not your gun/ally has a special ability, an icon will appear beneath the Ammo counter. Tap the icon to activate the skill, which can include anything from healing yourself to chucking a ridiculous amount of grenades.

Tips and tricks

Be patient. It will take some time to earn enough Cash to buy new guns, but it’ll be worth it. Besides, you can keep replaying any mission you’d like as often as you’d like to save up. Or you could buy the really powerful ones with real money, I suppose.

If grinding for cash, consider Boss levels. They pay more, and if you’ve already beaten them once you can certainly do it again. If possible try to “Go Alone!” to maximize your earnings.

Go with what you prefer, not with what you get a bonus for. Just because your character specializes in a specific type of weapon doesn’t mean you always have to use it. A 10% damage bonus on a 190-damage assault rifle doesn’t really mean much if you’ve got a 230-damage shotgun.

If you find a gun you like, upgrade it. It can certainly be tempting to save up all your Cash for a more powerful weapon, but the amount of cash needed for even the lowliest of weapons in the shop is rather absurd. Better to make what you’ve got a lot more powerful and earn more money easier than to struggle with a low-end weapon.

Consider switching your leader from time to time. Leaders gain the most experience from a mission, and if you only use one character the whole time you’ll end up with a fairly large discrepancy between everyone’s levels – thus hurting their chances at surviving when things start to get really tough.

If you don’t care about saving up Cash for anything specific, bring an ally on every mission. The amount of Cash they deduct from your earnings is minimal, and it’s always nice to have extra help.

Carefully weigh your options when deciding which path to take when the mission branches. If one of the requirements is to spend no more than 30 seconds in each area, you might want to pick the route that gives you 8 enemies to kill instead of 10. Conversely, if there’s no such restriction and you want to rack-up a high combo, it might be better to go after more enemies.

Try to keep your armory under control. If you perform well during missions you’ll earn 2 random gun draws each time. That can amount to quite a few guns lying around, many of which will undoubtedly be duplicates. Just take a moment to scroll through your list before you jump into a mission and think about selling off what you don’t want or need.

Aim for the head. Obviously, but do it. It earns kills faster and makes combos easier to maintain.

Congratulations!

You have completed Gamezebo’s quick start guide for Lawless. Be sure to check back often for game updates, staff and user reviews, user tips, forums comments, and much more here at Gamezebo!